Re: [GIT PULL v2 1/5] processor.h: introduce cpu_relax_yield

Russell King - ARM Linux
2016-11-15T12:30:30Z

On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 11:03:11AM +0200, Christian Borntraeger wrote:
> For spinning loops people do often use barrier() or cpu_relax().
> For most architectures cpu_relax and barrier are the same, but on
> some architectures cpu_relax can add some latency.
> For example on power,sparc64 and arc, cpu_relax can shift the CPU
> towards other hardware threads in an SMT environment.
> On s390 cpu_relax does even more, it uses an hypercall to the
> hypervisor to give up the timeslice.
> In contrast to the SMT yielding this can result in larger latencies.
> In some places this latency is unwanted, so another variant
> "cpu_relax_lowlatency" was introduced. Before this is used in more
> and more places, lets revert the logic and provide a cpu_relax_yield
> that can be called in places where yielding is more important than
> latency. By default this is the same as cpu_relax on all architectures.

Rather than having to update all these architectures in this way, can't
we put in some linux/*.h header something like:

#ifndef cpu_relax_yield
#define cpu_relax_yield() cpu_relax()
#endif

so only those architectures that need to do something need to be
modified?

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